K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Two weeks without journalling

On a whim, about two weeks ago I built a system that was straight ext2 partitions. I originally had it in my mind that I was going to tinker with JFS or ReiserFS again, just to be funny.

I ended up keeping the ext2 layout though, because it seems exceptionally fast — even faster than XFS on this machine, or a tweaked ext3 layout.

Perhaps it’s just my imagination, but I think I’ll be keeping it for a while. I haven’t had any data corruption problems yet — which is exactly as many data corruption problems as I’ve had with every other filesystem combined. I keep anything important on a second hard drive, so I don’t know that I would even worry if it did suddenly crash.

I have noticed though, that on the first reboot after installation, the filesystem check invariably finds inode problems and wants to fix them. But nothing ever comes of that.

Aside from the noatime option that I set at installation time, I don’t bother tweaking it. And maybe it’s just my imagination that it’s faster, but I think I’ll hold on to it for a while longer.